Muslim families hand out roses at London memorial
Beyza Coskun (left) and Mutlu Sancaktutar have 1,000 roses with a message to hand out. Photo: ABC
At a memorial site for the London Bridge attack victims, several Muslim families have been handing out roses attached with a message declaring their disgust at the violence of extremism.
“They are trying to rag the entire human kind to a miserable end,” Mutlu Sancaktutar said.
“And to do that they are actually harvesting hatred, violence tendencies, bigotry, ignorance, poverty in certain territories generating further hatred.”
The 39-year-old software engineer said he heard the news about the Saturday night attack that left at least seven people dead while he was at home in Kingston, about 20 kilometres south.
He and other Muslim families, who are mostly from Turkey, were determined to act.
They handed out the roses with a letter attached, describing their sense of frustration.
“We have the deepest profound feelings of sadness,” Beyza Coskun said.
“And I’m worried about the contamination of perceptions of Islam and terrorism … the two words are often used in the same sentence and it’s a careless use of language.”
Mr Sancaktutar, who is self-employed, said it was so important to him to spread a better message of Islam that he was prepared to shut his business and lose a day’s salary.
“The problem about terrorism and evil is not that the evil, the bad people, are too strong to defeat it’s that the good people are too busy to fight,” he said.
‘“So we thought this was the best ‘busy-ness’ we can have today.”
The group had 1,000 roses ready to hand out but rainy weather meant people were moving quickly through the area and not ready to stop for a chat.
They were confident though that by the end of the day they would have spoken to enough people to have made their venture worthwhile.
But Ms Coskun maintained that she is worried that Muslims will further be perceived largely in relation to terrorism following the attack.
“One thousand roses … if it was a sunny day probably people would be happy to stop and be interested,” she said.
– ABC